There may be no more familiar sight in bike racing than the breakaway, the rider or riders who boldly jump ahead of the peloton in a race’s opening kilometers and attempt to steal a victory.

The break is a time-honored part of bicycle racing. It’s also a low-percentage game; especially today, breakaways are caught before the finish far more often than they succeed. In the 2014 Tour de France, it took until Stage 8 for the first long break to win. And even if it does stay clear to the finish, once the break’s ad hoc teamwork crumbles in the face of late-race attacks, there’s no guarantee of success for an individual rider.

But as futile as it looks, there’s both an art and science to the breakaway: when it works, when it doesn’t, and how to make one stick.

The Right Conditions
The ideal breakaway stage in a race like the Tour is a matter of terrain, weather, and timing. Hillier stages, where sprinters’ teams chase less effectively, are better than flat ones. Tailwinds favor a break; headwinds give the advantage to the pack, where a larger number of riders can share the work.

And a stage that comes immediately before a major challenge like a mountaintop finish means that many teams won’t bother to chase, preferring to focus on the next day’s objective. Rain similarly dampens enthusiasm for a pursuit.

Narrow, winding roads can also give the advantage to small groups. They negotiate obstacles more easily than a big pack, and the constantly twisting route can keep a break out of sight even if they’re no more than 30 seconds up the road. Breakaways tend to be more successful later in a Grand Tour. As the race goes on, riders get tired, and the attrition of the race means there are fewer motivated chasers with the legs to hunt down an attack.

The Right Mix
You rarely see it because television coverage doesn’t often show the entire stage, but breakaway attempts begin almost from the gun. Every stage has what’s called a “depart fictif,” a neutral section that can be as many as 15 kilometers long (but is more often about five).

The depart fictif is a chance for riders to get their legs moving before the action begins (and, increasingly, to safely get out of crowded city centers where the stage begins). The pace is easy, riders stretch out tired muscles, and calls to the team cars come often as riders grab clothing or food they forgot, or drop back to let a mechanic address a malfunction. But when the race crosses kilometer zero, the flag drops and the attacks start.

It might seem like a breakaway’s composition is total luck. But it’s really a complex mix determined by the objectives of most teams in the race. A smaller team, like wild-card invitee Bretagne-Séché, wants to infiltrate every break it can. They don’t have a true GC contender, and they’re outgunned in the sprints. A break is their only chance for a stage win or, at least a bit of TV time for their sponsor.

Even some powerful teams, like Orica-GreenEdge, came to the 2014 Tour hunting nothing but stages. Without a general classification (GC) contender or a real sprinter of note, the Aussie outfit is gambling on breaks. Others are refashioning objectives on the fly due to circumstance. Garmin-Sharp’s Sebastian Langeveld joined the Stage 11 break after his team leader, Andrew Talansky, didn’t start that morning. Without its GC contender, Garmin will re-assess its targets. It’s teams like this that animate the race.

Behind, it’s up to the other teams with opposing objectives to sort out whether they’re okay with the riders who are trying to go up the road. They may chase the break attempt down because it’s too big, or because a rider going up the road is too high on GC and could take the overall lead, or because their team missed the move and they want a rider in the break.

The magic number for GC teams is 5-5: five riders up the road with a five-minute lead. That’s a manageable number of riders at a distance that’s controllable: far enough to discourage riders from attempting to bridge across, but not so far that it upends the GC order. Sometimes it can take an hour of racing to establish the breakaway. Until it does get clear, speeds are incredibly high—on the order of 45–50 kilometers an hour—which makes life at the back rough for any injured or ill racers just trying to hang on.

The Chase
Often, once the break does get clear, things in the pack calm down. The speeds lessen, and the field often stops for a quick bathroom stop (in a sport with five-hour contests and no timeouts, you go when you can), which helps the break establish its lead.

At that point, the objective shifts from chasing the break down to keeping it at the right distance—the latter part of that 5-5 rule. The race leader’s team has the chief responsibility for setting pace. But they’re often joined by other teams with objectives on the day, so you’ll see, say, three Astana riders setting pace for yellow jersey Vincenzo Nibali, joined by a Giant-Shimano rider, one from Lotto-Belisol and perhaps another sprinter’s team.

As the race goes on, the responsibility shifts. The race leader’s team keeps the gap manageable, but with about 50 kilometers to go, the other teams hunting victory take over and lift the pace. Here’s where the math comes into play.

On flat to gently rolling terrain, the pack can generally make up about 5–10 seconds per kilometer on a break. The pace is set to do exactly that. Ideally, the catch comes with less than 10 kilometers to race. Any farther out, and keeping the speed high enough to discourage further breakaways becomes very difficult.

Riders get regular time checks to help gauge their progress. In the past, these came solely from a motorcycle official (clothed head to toe in yellow) with a chalkboard, and gaps were taken from fixed points on the road. Today, GPS transmitters on the bikes constantly update the gap, and riders can get information from team radios while measuring out their effort on their power meters.

Sometimes, they get it wrong. At the 2001 Tour, a 14-rider breakaway managed to get 22 minutes’ lead by the halfway point of Stage 8, courtesy of a tailwind and uninterested chase. By the finish, they were more than 35 minutes ahead, a gap that—had the right rider been in the mix—could have all but ended the Tour (as it was, Kazakhstan’s Andrei Kivilev finished fourth overall due to his huge advantage).

Other times, it’s a desperate chase to the line, as on Stage 11 when Tony Gallopin just barely outlasted the pack. Second-place John Degenkolb was so close he was credited with the same time. More often, a move is caught in the last kilometer in the final mad rush of the sprinters’ dash to the line.

Whatever the outcome, each night is a reset of sorts. Racers head back to the team hotel, have dinner and a massage, and study the road book with their directors. They plot their strategy for the next day. Perhaps they will try again tomorrow, or the day after that.

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